by Nicole Fox
The doctor is a tall, wide-built woman who reminds me of pictures of my own mother: sturdy and maternal in all the ways I’m not. She wears her hair in blonde ringlets to her shoulders. I think her voice is sweet until she says, “You’re pregnant.”
“What?” I reply, sitting on the chair opposite her with my hands between my legs. “I don’t think I heard you properly. What did you say?”
“Miss Ash, I am happy to say that you are expecting!”
“Happy,” I repeat.
She squints at me. A picture of a mountain hangs from the wall with the caption: No Climb Too Tough! I want to ball it up and shove it down her throat when she next opens her mouth. “A baby is always a blessing, I’m sure you’ll agree, Miss Ash.”
“It’s always a blessing, is it?” I pick up a pen with an alien head on the end and start tearing at the rubbery Martian with my thumbnail. “That seems like quite a general statement to me, Dr. Hughes. Doesn’t that seem like a general statement to you? I’m sure we can both think of hundreds of times when a baby isn’t a blessing.”
“Well, be that as it may—”
“Is that really part of your job?” I snap, vaguely aware that I’m making a fool of myself. “I thought your job was to do the doctor’s work, and leave the judgments at the door. So what? You find out I’m pregnant and now we’re best friends, and we’re supposed to bake cookies together and giggle over what to name the thing? Is that it?”
“It’s not a thing, Miss Ash. It’s a baby—”
I put down the pen—the alien is a cyclops now—and massage my eyes. I swallow bile, acidic as it slides down my throat and bubbles in my belly. “I would like some information on abortion, please.”
“Miss Ash …”
I open my eyes, glaring at her. “I haven’t read up on doctor’s rules recently, but it seems to me that if you finish the rest of that sentence you could be in some trouble. Are you really going to try and talk me out of making my own decision, Doctor, especially when you know jack shit about me? For all you know, I was—I’m not even going to say it, but you really need to change your goddamn attitude.”
I don’t remember standing up or leaning over the desk or placing my fists on the expensive wood. I lift my hands and step back, curtseying in what I hope is a comedic way. “Please.” My joke doesn’t diffuse the situation. She just looks at me like I’m crazy, which I’m starting to think I might be, just a little, since so many people look at me like that.
“I have some pamphlets,” Dr. Hughes says, opening the drawer with quite a bit of passive aggression. She slides them across the desk. “There you go. But please, think carefully.”
“Fine.”
I snatch them up and leave the office, stewing all the way to the car, wishing I could take Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and toss it at the building. I place the pamphlets on the passenger seat next to my sick bag and start the car, heading for the nearest convenience store. There’s no way I’m leaving this up to Doctor Hughes. I need a second opinion.
Half an hour later I’m sitting on the toilet with three pregnancy tests laid out on the bathtub. I pee on them one by one, trying not to let my mind stray to Logan and the consequences of all this, to stray to that one heated night. Could one night of pleasure really spread this far, have such far-reaching effects? Could my life really be changed forever because I screwed a man with muscles and hair like a Viking? I pace around the apartment while the tests are processing, picking up clothes and tossing them into the wash basket. I clean my bedroom of tissues and even strip and change the sheets, all so I don’t have to face reality. But reality always wins.
I return to the bathroom and look down at the tests: positive, positive, positive.
“So Dr. Hughes wasn’t an evil liar,” I whisper.
I go into the living room and drop onto the couch, staring at my reflection in the TV for what feels like a long time. A baby, a real-life baby, a human life, in here—I prod my belly—growing inside of me. Near the same place I put pizza and beer, there’s a little cell that’ll grow into a baby unless I do something about it. I think about the planned trajectory of my life and how it does not, at any point, involve becoming pregnant by an outlaw biker. I even wrote a list once, when I was deciding whether or not to become Cora Ash. “Get Pregnant by Criminal” was not on there.
Have I been thinking about Logan these past weeks? At night, sometimes, has my hand strayed down between my legs, toying with myself and pretending that it’s him? Have I sometimes closed my eyes and remembered the feeling of perfect vulnerability when he entered me from behind? Perhaps I have, but that doesn’t mean I should start a family with the guy … even if my thoughts of him have extended beyond the sexual, to that morning when he was making coffee; maybe I could have spoken to him; maybe we could’ve grabbed breakfast.
I take out my cellphone and dial Mr. Polly, my father’s will executor. Then I hang up the phone before the first ring and curse myself for an idiot.
I leave my apartment and find the nearest payphone—who knew they still had these things?—and dial him from there, ignoring the smell of piss and cheap beer, the crude graffiti on the broken glass.
“Hello, Polly,” I say.
“Melissa?” he barks. “Is that you?”
“It sure is.”
“You sound … are you drunk?”
“Drunk. You could say that. Drunk on life. Life’ll do that sometimes, won’t it?”
“You’re ranting. Where are you? You’ve dropped off the face of the earth.”
“No, just off the face of your earth. I want to check some technicalities about this whole baby thing.” I wonder if I’m a essentially a selfish person to think this way: a new apartment, the freedom to pursue singing without interruption, a cushion of money to fall back on. “Is there anything in the will that says I have to keep the baby after it’s born, or can I give it away to a poor couple who can’t have one of their own, or something like that?”
He pauses, and then says, “No, there is nothing that says you have to keep it. You only have to give birth to it—and be married at the time of the birth.”
“Married. There’s no wiggle room on that part?”
“No, Melissa, there’s no wiggle room, and frankly I find it offensive that you would insult your father’s final wishes by—”
I hang up and return to my apartment, thinking. I have no clue what I want to do. It seems like the choices fall into two camps: get rid of the kid or marry Logan and get my money, and then make some childless couple happy. I’m sure there are organizations that do that sort of thing. For a moment I think about what it’d be like to hold the kid, to feel his or her tiny hand in mine …
“No, no, no.”
I need to contact Logan, but I have no way of doing so. I don’t even have his goddamn cellphone number.
I grab my leather jacket and head down to my car. There’s only one thing for it: drive to every dive bar in this town and ask for him, one by one, like some ancient Norwegian queen travelling the land looking for fealty from each one of her chieftains. I glance at myself in the mirror, tired-looking and red-eyed from all the puking, and laugh grimly. A queen … yeah, right.
Chapter Eleven
Logan
We kick up dust as we ride out of town, ten Demons surrounding the hearse, ten more leading and ten more following, and then twenty more way behind, making sure that no traffic interferes with us, blocking the road for Dad. I ride directly behind the hearse so that I can see into the coffin, his leather laid over the wood, the demon seeming to grin at me. I still find it hard to believe that Dad is in there. Or if he is in there, he must be pretty pissed, and soon his fist’ll come crashing through the wood, and he’ll lean up and brush away the shrapnel and swear at everyone, demanding to know what we were thinking by putting him in there.
We ride to the cemetery and park out front, all fifty-some of us and their women. I join Mom as she steps from her car. She’s in complete mourning dress, black h
ead to toe, with a black veil, which is how I know for sure she’s shattered inside. Mom never covers her face, not that I can remember. She offers me her hand, which shakes nonstop. I take it and lead her into the cemetery, and then return to help the fellas carry the coffin. My old man is heavy on the shoulder, but not as heavy as he ought to be. I find myself wishing they’d put some rocks in there so the other guys don’t have to know how small he became.
One of the fellas has a set of bagpipes. He plays them, singing a lonesome song over the empty cemetery. A light wind blows against my face and my neck. I’m sweating, sticky, becoming cold as the wind blows and blows. I think of a thousand memories of Dad and then suddenly it’s like I’m going to cry. I feel the tears in the back of my throat, threatening to rise into my face, into my eyes, explode out, and slide down my cheeks. I haven’t cried since I was a kid. I choke them back, make damn sure not a single tear comes out, not in front of the fellas. I can’t cry in front of the men. These men have to follow me into gunfights, have to believe that I’ve got their backs, have to believe that I can handle any shit that comes our way. The last thing they need is a weeper for a boss.
My only choice is to make myself completely solid, to lock out all the emotion so that none of it gets shown. We drop him beside the grave, where the mechanical apparatus will lower him down, and then I join Mom’s side. She has her hand under her veil, dabbing over and over again at tears that won’t stop. I put my arm around her and she leans into me, and at least then I know my coldness is serving some purpose. A couple of the men have tears in their eyes, but they’re older, sixty, seventy, men who rode with my dad since he first joined. Old men don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but all the young men are dry-eyed.
We stand in the midday sun and listen to the priest talk about how Dad is in a better place and how he’s happy with old friends and his parents and all that, and how he’s waiting up there for me and Ma. I don’t want to take anything from the man in the robe but I don’t see how a man like Dad could be happy on his back with some cherub motherfucker playing the harp and not a beer in sight, everything clean and wholesome. I wonder if there’s boxing up in heaven, or drag races, or crazy bastards doing wheelies after ten slugs of whisky. I wonder if there’s knuckledusters or butterfly knives.
Soon the funeral is over, Dad is lowered into the earth, and I approach the coffin to toss my piece of dirt onto the casket. I hold the dirt in my hand, grains of earth scraping my palm, a small rock digging into the crook of my forefinger. I lift my hand and hold it there but I can’t let go.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asks after a minute of everybody just staring at me. She stands at my shoulder. “Drop it, Logan.”
“I’m not burying him,” I say. “The fuck am I? A gravedigger?” I toss the dirt onto the ground and turn away.
I won’t be the one to put him in the ground. That goes against everything the giant bastard ever taught me. All my life he taught me that we have to take care of each other, look out for each other, and now they expect me to toss dirt onto him like he’s dirt, too. I grit my teeth and stand silently for the rest of the ceremony. I wish there was some way to contact Cora other than just turning up at her apartment. I guess I could do that, but that’s fuckin’ crazy and I know it. That’s the sort of thing that, if a girl did it to me, I’d call her a psycho. I need a woman right now, and Cora’s the one. If I had my way I’d close my eyes, and when I opened them I’d be with her, both of us naked, thrusting, biting. Or maybe we’d just sit a while and finally have that coffee.
“What are you thinking about?” Mom asks on the walk back to the bikes.
“Nothing,” I mutter.
“You didn’t throw the dirt,” she points out.
“I know.”
“Won’t you talk to me?”
“About what?”
“I understand,” she says. “We’ll talk later.”
“Nothing to talk about.”
I climb onto my bike and lead the men toward The Devil, the bar I chose for the wake, which is more of an excuse for everybody to get shitfaced. When I chose it, I told myself it was at random, but really I’m hoping that Cora is there. I have this whole fantasy of walking in and spotting her onstage, and after her set she’ll come over to me and ask what’s going on. I’ll tell her and she’ll know how I feel without having to ask, without me having to show it. She’ll put her hand on my arm and kiss me on the cheek and tell me how sorry she is.
But that’s not going to happen and I need to forget about that shit.
We stop outside the bar, all fifty-some of us, and approach it like a mob. I arranged it with the manager beforehand—a friendly, bubbly woman; Charles quit—so there’s no problem. We get half the place to ourselves and the other half is still open to the public, a red rope down the middle separating the bar.
I sit on my side of the rope and order a whisky as the men talk and mingle with their women all around me. There’s no band, no singer, no DJ, just music playing through the speakers from the jukebox. I drink three whiskies and order a fourth, intent on getting so blasted I can barely think. I want to fall into an abyss so deep I can’t even remember that Dad is dead.
“You think you’re tough, eh?” he said to me once, when I was sixteen. I came home with my fists grazed from a fight with a kid in my class, a fight where I was in the wrong, a fight where I started it for no reason other than I felt like fighting. “Is that it? Fight with every bastard you see ’cause it makes you feel strong?”
He sprang across the room and grabbed me by the shirt, lifting me off my feet like I weighed nothing. “Do you feel tough now, big man?” He threw me and I slammed into the wall, winded. “You don’t start shit you don’t need to start. If someone comes at you or they’re disrespecting you, maybe you need to start swinging. But you don’t do it because you wanna feel big or tough or wanna act the big man. You’re better than that.”
That was one of those times that I was only thankful for years later, after I stopped resenting the old man. But I’m glad he came down tough on me like that, stopped me from becoming too wild, stopped me from bullying and hurting when I didn’t need to. I went back to school and apologized to that kid, and today his name is Spider and he’s a patched Demon Rider.
Across the bar, the fellas are telling stories about Dad. I could go over there and tell some stories with them, get the grieving process started, but the thing is, I don’t wanna get that process started. I don’t want to pretend that everything’s okay just because we can make some jokes about the time he ran out of gas halfway to a job and stole some from a parked minivan. Ha, ha, ha, but he’s still dead; shit’s still fucked.
“Another,” I say, nodding to the barman. He’s a different man from before. I guess they changed shifts. This one’s older and has some concern in his face, whereas the other was a lady who looked like she’d rather have been in bed.
“Are you Logan Birch?” the man asks.
“Last time I checked.” I’m surprised by how casual and carefree I’m able to sound.
“Some girl’s been in here asking for you. Sort of punky hair. She’s got a snake tattoo on her neck. I think I recognized her, but I only worked here for a little bit.”
“What was her name?”
“See, I don’t rightly remember. But she left you her number. Do you want it?”
I’ll tear your arm off if you don’t give it to me. I want it more than I want anything right now.
“Sure,” I say.
And so, a minute later, I’m sitting here with Cora Ash’s phone number in my hand. Either that, or some woman with the exact same tattoo as Cora left me her digits. I hold the piece of paper between my thumb and forefinger, stroking over her cursive handwriting. Even that is serpent-like, sinuous and flowing. I think about calling her, and then order another drink. This cycle continues for a while, always deciding that I’ll call her after just one more whisky …
One more whisky becomes one more, and one mo
re, and then the sun has set—has been set for a long time—and I’m at my place, sitting on my couch with a bottle in my hand and the cellphone in the other, peering down at the coffee table where the paper rests, trying to make out the numbers.
Chapter Twelve
Cora
When my cell goes off and I don’t recognize the number, I dare to hope that it’s Logan. I need it to be Logan so that I can start sorting this whole mess out. I don’t want to disentangle this web alone. I need help. A baby is too much; the pressure of that decision weighs on me heavily. If it’s some marketing company calling up to see if I’ve heard about the awesome new Internet service, I’m going to be pissed.
